Treaty with the Sioux, 1805

Signed September 23, 1805 at “Pike Island,” Minnesota

In 1805, Lewis and Clark were traveling through the western regions of North
America. Regular reports on this expedition were sent to Spanish authorities by
James Wilkinson -- first governor of the Louisiana Territory, a paid spy for Spain
and an alleged conspirator with Aaron Burr in trying to establish an empire in the
Southwest. In the summer of 1805, Wilkinson enlisted Zebulon Pike to mount an expedition up the Mississippi River, without informing the federal government.

In September, Pike met with a group of Dakota leaders at an island at the
confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, a place of great cultural
significance to Dakota people that is now called Pike Island. He recorded in his
journal that two of the seven Dakota leaders had agreed to sell the site so that the U.S.
could build a fort and promote trade, in exchange for an unspecified amount of
money. (Pike valued the purchase at $200,000 in his journal.) Upon parting, Pike
left $200 worth of gifts and allowed the traders that accompanied him to leave
barrels of whiskey, leading some writers to characterize these gifts as the purchase
price.

Years later, the U.S. Senate unilaterally added an amount of $2,000 to the treaty,
which was never proclaimed by the President (a necessary step in making treaties
official). Subsequently, the Dakota granted Pike Island to Pelagie Ainse, the
mixed-blood daughter of a French fur trader and a Dakota woman; Pelagie became
the mother of Alexander Faribault.

Fifteen years after the Pike meeting, the U.S. returned to build Fort Snelling on the
site. As late as 1856, however, the title to the land was in question. In that year,
the Military Affairs Committee of the Senate issued a report that stated:

"It does appear that General Pike made an arrangement in 1805 with
two Sioux Indians for the purchase of the lands of that tribe, including
the Faribault island, but there is no evidence that this agreement, to
which there is not even a witness, and in which no consideration was
named, was ever considered binding upon the Indians, or that they ever
yielded up the possession of their lands under it.. [I]t was never
promulgated, nor can it be now found upon the statute books, like any
other treaty—if indeed a treaty it may be called—nor were its
stipulations ever complied with on the part of the United States."

Pike Island (Pilot Knob, Mouth of St. Peters River, by Seth Eastman)

More Information

Relations Among Signers

Family Members

Alexander Faribault(upper right)
George Faribault (lower right)

Alexander Faribault and George Faribault

Alexander Faribault was the son of a mixed-blood Dakota and French woman and a prominent French fur trader. His father survived regime changes in the fur trade, working for the British Northwest Fur Company and later the American Fur Company, with whom Alexander became a clerk at the age of 12. Before he turned 20, he was a licensed fur trader and his marriage to Mary Graham, member of another prominent French-Dakota family, contributed to his very successful business enterprises.

Faribault eventually diversified his business interests to include banking (in partnerships that included Henry Sibley, Charles Oakes and Charles Borup); milling; and land speculation, founding the town of Faribault and one of the original partners in the establishment of Hastings. He accompanied the Dakota delegation to Washington for a treaty in 1837, but did not sign the treaty. In 1851, while a member of the Minnesota Legislature, he was one of a group of traders who helped engineer both Dakota land cession treaties and in that process received $13,000, roughly equivalent to $300,00 today.

George Faribault, the son of Alexander and Mary, also signed one of the 1851 Dakota treaties. He became Chief of Indian Police at the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota.